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CNET Editors' Rating

The GoodJust barely faster than the competing card from ATI; more power-efficient at idle than its competition.

The BadDouble-wide card takes up more expansion room.

The Bottom LineEVGA's GeForce GTX 9800+ Superclocked edition has basically the same price-performance benefit as its Radeon HD 4850-based graphics card competition. With identical bang-for-the-buck, you'll like this card if you demand power efficiency, but you should turn to ATI's card if your PC has limited upgrade room.

EVGA's Superclocked edition of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 9800+ is a fast 3D graphics card at an affordable price. You can expect it to play most current PC games at smooth frame rates, especially on lower resolutions. We've seen prices as low as $165 and as high as $235, so you would be wise to shop around. And those with limited upgrade room might consider the comparable card from ATI , the Radeon HD 4850 that, unlike the double-wide GeForce GTX 9800+, requires only a single expansion slot. Otherwise, the differences between these two cards, in price, power consumption, and speed are negligible.

EVGA GeForce GTX+ 9800 Superclocked

Diamond Radeon HD 4850

Price

$165

$180

Manufacturing process

55nm

55nm

Core clock

756MHz

625MHz

Stream processors

128

800

Stream processor clock

1,836MHz

NA

Memory

512MB

512MB

Memory speed

1.1GHz

993MHz

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 9800+ chip debuted last July for around $230. In this "Superclocked" design from EVGA, Nvidia's chip has its core clock speed boosted to 756MHz, from its stock 738MHz setting. This chip was supposed to be Nvidia's Radeon HD 4850-killer, but as you'll see on our charts, even this overclocked model only barely outperforms its competition.

We ran some rather aggressive benchmarks on these cards, and for the most part they held up well. The exception, as usual, is Crysis, on which neither card was able to achieve a playable frame rate. Even if the Radeon card was faster on that test than the GeForce, it's still only hitting 20 frames per second on 1,400x960, the lowest resolution we tried. Dropping the detail level down to medium and the anti-aliasing to 2x resulted in frame rates around 35 fps, but still well below the 60 frames per second hallowed ground.